Cryptocurrency market valuation to hit $1 trillion this year. The market cap of cryptocurrency seems to just increase. Even though some of the individual ones are falling but cumulatively, the market cap seems to increase year-on-year.

According to the CEO of Kraken, Jesse Powell, in the rest of the months of 2018, cryptocurrencies would see accelerated growth. They would be able to pull back from the bottom to new highs.

According to him, there are many businesses revolving around cryptocurrencies now. Also, there are many people in the know-how of cryptocurrency is now. This would propel the entire cryptocurrency market to cross a valuation of $ 1 trillion.

The current cumulative market cap of all the cryptocurrency is currently is around $ 417 billion. Before the recent downturn, it was around $ 800 billion. Thus, even if the cumulative market cap is able to rise just 25% from the peak, it would be able to hit the valuation of $ 1 trillion.

Regulatory concerns:

The main problem in the growth of cryptocurrencies is the regulatory concern. If the regulatory concerns are not tackled soon, the number of traders, as well as investors in cryptocurrencies, would go on decreasing. This is the reason why proper regulatory framework, as well as trading mechanisms, need to be involved.

Many of the governments and authorities all over the world are working on it. However, it is important for the authorities to go ahead and create a framework soon so that the traders are able to easily invest.

Regulating ICO’s:

ICO’s bring in fresh capital to the cryptocurrency marketplace. This is the reason why any regulations on the ICO would not only make the process much more transparent but also make the ICOs much more valuable. Once the ICO’s get the approval, they would be valued higher as they would fulfill all the regulatory requirements as well. This is the reason why once a proper framework is in place, ICO market would be able to add more value to the cryptocurrency space. source: CNBC

In the meantime, it remains to be seen whether the bottom which currently looks to be in its place is the actual bottom or not. Most of the cryptocurrencies have already bounced sharply from these bottom levels in the last couple of weeks. If the momentum is supportive and the negative news reduces, most of the cryptocurrencies would rise significantly in the near future. This is positive news for most of the cryptocurrency holders as many of them have been trapped since the recent bear market in cryptocurrencies.

Advertisement

Fundstrat, a Wall Street-based investment firm led by Tom Lee, reported that the hashpower of Bitcoin has doubled since May.

“Despite BTC bear market, hashpower doubled since May to 57 EH/s – Even with upgrades to existing equipment, implies almost 1GW of new power consumption vs 5.2GW in May ’18. Breakeven now $7300 ($5300 cash BE) vs. $6000 in May,” Sam Doctor at Fundstrat said.

Exponential Increase in Mining Activity

Since February, the valuation of the cryptocurrency market has fallen by more than 80 percent. Yet, mining activity in the cryptocurrency sector has continued to increase at an exponential rate.

The difficulty of Bitcoin mining, which measures how difficult it is to find a hash below a given target, changes based on the hashrate of the dominant cryptocurrency. If less people are mining Bitcoin, then the difficulty of Bitcoin mining declines. But, when more people mine it and the hashrate of the network increases, the difficulty of Bitcoin mining increases.

When the difficulty is increased, it is harder to find blocks, which leads to a decline in revenue for miners. The block reward of Bitcoin changes once every four years and as such, the discrepancy of revenue from mining BTC is often caused by the volatility in the difficulty of Bitcoin mining.

If the reward remains the same for four years yet the difficulty increases, less BTC will be generated to cover the costs of miners and mining centers. That means, if the price of BTC decreases as well, then the revenue of miners decrease even further.

Hence, when the price of BTC falls, which leads to a decline in mining revenue, it is normal to expect the hashrate of Bitcoin to fall as well.

However, throughout the past five months, the hashrate of Bitcoin has more than doubled, despite its 70 percent drop in value within an eight-month period. That means, miners are still willing to expand their resources and mine Bitcoin with lower profit margins in a bear market.

Earlier this month, BitMEX Research revealed that Bitmain, the largest mining company in the cryptocurrency sector, has been maintaining its profit margin at a low level to solidify its dominance over the market.

“These low prices are likely to be a deliberate strategy by Bitmain, to squeeze out their competition by causing them to experience lower sales and therefore financial difficulties. In our view, herein lies the key to one of the main driving forces behind the decision to IPO. A successful IPO may increase the firepower available to continue this strategy and eliminate an advantage rivals could have by doing their IPOs first.”

Positive Indicator

The increase in the difficulty and hashrate of Bitcoin is always a positive indicator, as it means that the Bitcoin blockchain network is stronger, more robust, and resilient to attacks. More to that, it also demonstrates the willingness of miners to continue their mining operations despite a clear drop in profit from the decline in the price of BTC.

Share this:

The CEO and founder of Galaxy Digital Capital Management, Mike Novogratz, shared his opinion on his Twitter that crypto market finally reached the “bottom” and later there will no way down for it.

This is the BGCI chart…I think we put in a low yesterday. retouched the highs of late last year and the point of acceleration that led to the massive rally/bubble… markets like to retrace to the breakout..we retraced the whole of the bubble. #callingabottompic.twitter.com/EasTBYgjSj

In his opinion, the attached chart from Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index shows that the market reached the point which it was at in the middle of November last year, just before the start of the record bullish trend and before the BTC price rise to its maximum of $20,000.

Share this:

The crypto enthusiast John McAfee told in an interview about the future of Bitcoin’s price in the long term.

McAfee commented on the fall of Bitcoin from $7400 to $6400 in 3 days, he believes that this is the manipulation of the market:

“You can only manipulate something if you have the power to do so. Now if that thing becomes more valuable your power decreases, and the inherent value is many times the current price of Bitcoin. It just comes through always in every market situation. The people that are manipulating it, they are going to lose billions of dollars and then it’s going to be over.”

McAfee said that Bitcoin’s market is now in an “infantile state,” comparing it to a blade of grass susceptible to the wind or step. He also added that it will become “a fire raging in the forest” soon.

Finally, McAfee talked about the “mathematics” of the coin and made his own forecast of Bitcoin’s price for 2020:

“Why don’t we look at the last Bitcoin? We have thousands of people to mine one coin. What is that coin going to be worth? Maybe billions. Mathematics doesn’t lie. Say what you want, mathematics doesn’t lie. If it’s not a million dollars in 2020, it has to be. The end of 2020, December. That’s my prediction, I’m going to stand by it…it is the number 1 coin for processing transactions. Run the numbers.”

Share this:

The CoinMarketCap platform tracks information about 2000 assets, thus they are to know what data or innovations users want to observe on the site. That is why the major resource of cryptocurrency prices conducted a survey on their Twitter.

Would you be interested in voting for projects or exchanges to be listed on CoinMarketCap? 🤔

At the press time, 61% of the 5625 voters are interested in the future project and exchanges listed on CoinMarketCap. 29% of them don’t see any point in it and 10% don’t like this idea at all.

There are rumors that this questionnaire is conducted due to lack of trust to CoinMarketCap among users. Since previously he delisted Hong Kong exchanges, when they, as they told, had a big volatility in January this year.

Regarding the survey, Clashicly, the developer of BTCC, made a controversial statement in a private interview to Bitcoinist that CoinMarketCap is abusing the trust of millions they have in them. He also added that they should be responsible for listing “garbage”.

This wallet conforms to all the strict requirements of Apple Inc. adopted in early June. The co-founder of this startup, John Egan, stated that he wanted to create a project that can be used by everyday users, not only by CA. He planned to make the wallet more about its functions than trading, i.e. there will not any information about token sales, etc.

Egan even compared the work of Vault to the way iOS on iPhone works. As the developers want to create an ecosystem based on blockchain technology where users can share and use apps, like they do on iPhones.

Share this:

BitPay wallet application that provides Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash payment processing services to traders has been removed from the Google Play Market without any warnings from developers.

Representatives of BitPay did not provide updates and did not announce about any technical work, so this decision was quite unexpected for the company.

Also, users of Reddit report that the application of a company providing Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash purchase/sale services – Bitcoin.com – has disappeared from Google Play.

It is quite a strange situation, because both applications had an average rating of 4.5 stars, which indicates a fairly high degree of confidence in customer service. Although, as for Bitcoin.com, there have been numerous cases recently when users were asked to give negative rating to this application and write a corresponding comment.

The CEO of Bitcoin.com, Roger Ver accused the new Google Play policies of the incident.

“Google told us that it was because they no longer allow cryptocurrency mining apps,” wrote Ver. “I have no idea how they came under the impression that our wallet is a mining app.”

The collective market cap of all cryptocurrencies has plunged to $186 billion on Wednesday — its lowest level this year, and the lowest it’s been since Novermber 2017.

It’s a long, painful drop for the crypto market from its January peak of $831 billion, and while everything’s possible in crypto, currently there’s no end in sight.

Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is actually holding up well, with a price of $6,281 at writing time, representing a 1.91% loss in the last 24 hours according to CoinMarketCap. This is also a long way from its January peak of over $19,800, but Bitcoin has stubbornly refused to go below $6,000 this year, bouncing back up from that level on several occasions.

But other cryptocurrencies, most notably Ethereum, the second-largest coin by market cap, are losing value at a tremendous pace. At $172, down 11.6% in the last 24 hours, Ethereum has reached a new bottom this year. Just one month ago, the price of one ETH was nearly double; two months ago it was nearly triple that amount.

The long, painful downfall of Ethereum.

Image: coinmarketcap

The reasons behind the decline in price haven’t changed much since last week: Institutional investors, banks and regulators are still wary of cryptocurrencies, perhaps increasingly so in recent months. And numerous startups that raised a lot of money through an ICO (initial coin offering) on the Ethereum platform, are now selling it for fiat money, which creates a selling pressure on the price.

This list, compiled by Diar, shows some of the better known ICO-funded startups and the amount of ETH that’s still in their wallets. It’s been shrinking at an increased pace lately, but there’s still a lot to sell. The authors estimate the total at roughly 3.5 million ETH, worth a little over $600 million, but the actual number is bigger, as numerous successful ICO-funded startups aren’t included in the list.

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has recently been cited by Bloomberg as saying that there’s a “ceiling in sight” for cryptocurrencies and that “there isn’t an opportunity for yet another 1,000-times growth in anything in the space anymore.” This may have contributed to the overall negative sentiment towards Ethereum. Buterin later clarified his comments on Twitter, saying his words have been misinterpreted.

To be clear, I never said that there is “no room for growth” in the crypto ecosystem. I said there is no room for *1000x price increases*. A 1000x price increase from today means $200T in crypto, or ~an entire 70% of today’s global wealth being in crypto.

Other major cryptocurrencies aren’t doing very well today either: Ripple is down to $0.26, a 3.7% decrease; Bitcoin Cash trades at $422, a 10.4% decrease, and EOS is at $4.86, a 2.6% decrease. The club of coins with a market cap above $10 billion has shrunk to three (there were more than ten at various points in crypto history): Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple, with the last one being on the verge of dropping out.

As a result, Bitcoin’s “dominance” — i.e., the percentage it represents in the total crypto market cap — has jumped to 57.8% according to CoinMarketCap. In March 2017, before the sharp rise of price of Ethereum and other alts (i.e., coins that aren’t Bitcoin), this number was over 85%, but then other cryptocurrencies started to rise and push Bitcoin’s dominance down. Right now, although the entire crypto market is shrinking, Bitcoin is actually re-establishing its dominance over all other coins.

The future for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the rest of the crypto market is uncertain. The downtrend might end if the SEC decides positively on a few proposed Bitcoin ETFs; a negative decision or further postponement (the decision is currently expected in late September) would likely mean a further decline in price.

Disclosure: The author of this text owns, or has recently owned, a number of cryptocurrencies, including BTC and ETH.

A proposal to build a “behind the grid” data centre – which it is claimed will be the first in Australia to be “powered primarily from renewable energy sources” – has received the backing of the Western Australian government.

DC Two announced its plans to build the data centre in August, and last week was named as a recipient of a government grant.

The new data centre will be situated in the coal-mining town of Collie, 200km south of Perth, and alongside a planned 20MW solar farm. The solar farm – being built by a company called Hadouken – obtained planning permission in April.

It is expected that both the first stages of the solar farm and the data centre – drawing a power supply of up to 4 megawatts – will come online early next year

The data centre was selected by the WA government to receive a slice of its $678,000 Collie Futures Small Grants Program, which backs projects that will drive long-term economic growth and stimulate jobs creation in the town.

“There’s incredible opportunities for diversification in Collie, and the McGowan government is standing side-by-side with industry and the community to drive new jobs and projects,” said WA regional development minister Alannah MacTiernan.

Collie is home to a number of coal mines and power stations, but the unemployment rate is increasing and hit 8.6 per cent in March.

“Collie requires strong support from government as its economy undergoes a transition. What we’re doing through this program is standing side by side with business and industry to turn ideas into reality to further strengthen Collie,” she added.

DC Two said it would use local businesses “from fabricators, electricians right through to general labourers” for to construct the containerised data centre.

“Once the build is complete, we will need one to two full time staff initially, increasing with customer demand,” the company added.

A diagram of the proposed data centre

When complete the data centre will house around 256 racks each capable of up to 30kw of IT load.

“The grant vindicates our differentiated data centre strategy. We are addressing the key issues of power consumption and cost with the aim of delivering a globally competitive offering. Accessing the grant will accelerate and broaden outcomes both for the region and ourselves,” said DC Two managing director Justin Thomas.

The data centre is being pitched as “specifically designed for crypto and Bitcoin mining”. DC Two also has a subsidiary, called D Coin, which is a crypto-mining hosting firm.

Cheap power is critical to profitability in cryptocurrency mining. Falls in the value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in recent months mean even when powered by very low-cost electricity, many mining operations are now struggling to break even.

Public utilities in Washington in the US last week hiked electricity prices for mining operations.

Join the newsletter!

<!– Computerworld"s twice-daily news service keeps you in touch with the latest, most important headlines from Australia and around the world. –>

Supply and Demand

According to a recent study, 9 percent of US undergraduates at universities throughout the globe polled had already taken a blockchain related class, and 26 percent intended to. The courses are there, but institutions struggle to keep up with the current demand for them.

Universities such as UPenn, Berkley and Cornell offer courses on Cryptography, ‘Blockchain and CryptoEconomics’, and ‘Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Distributed Ledger Technology’. Last year, one professor had 100 students vying for just 25 places in a blockchain class she co-taught.

Vocation, Vocation, Vocation

The main driver for this surge of interest is the job market. Over the last three years, the number of Bitcoin-related job postings on LinkedIn has increased massively. There has been a nine times increase in financial services jobs, and a four times increase in software positions.

Blockchain is Not an Island

Educators are quick to point out that focussing entirely on blockchain would be a folly. To specialize in one area before a career has even started would be less useful than gaining a broader overview of computer science and engineering.

Furthermore, “tomorrow’s blockchains will look nothing like today’s,” says Emin Gün Sirer, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. “We are not teaching people how to use today’s blockchains.”

Oh, and There was that Bitcoin Thing

Naturally, last year’s Bitcoin 00 mania also raised the profile of cryptocurrency outside of the classroom. Cornell, UPenn, and Berkeley all have active blockchain clubs that have seen a boost in interest from across the student spectrum during 2017.

It is positive that these future leaders of industry are at worst uncomfortable. At best, they are savvy to blockchain tech. It will certainly precipitate a refreshing shift from the progress-despising dinosaurs that the crypto community often deals with.

What are your thoughts on the increasing number of university crypto-class attendees? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!